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Strollerderby
Investopedia is reporting that it would cost nearly $100,000 annually to pay for all the services a homemaker provides. The economists say they calculated only those tasks that have monetary value (because my love and nagging are priceless, obviously) and used the lowest value for each calculation.
Private Chef, House Cleaner, Child Care, Personal Driver, Laundry Service, and Lawn Maintenance were included in the tally, bringing the grand total to $96,261 per year. It was noted that Lawn Maintenance was a “less common, but possible duty of a homemaker.”
As Strollerderby reported last May, Salary.com offers a calculator that lets you determine the worth of a homemaker, based on the number of children and your region of the United States. Using that calculator, my annual worth as a Philadelphia-area stay-at-home mom of four kids is a whopping $122,011.
How many of us are really engaged in the mommy wars?
Moms versus moms. So tiring. So tiring I hardly want to write about it. Not tiring for television talk show producers though. Oh no! They rub their hands together in glee anytime they think they can produce an on-air cat fight.
I wonder if anyone has ever done the research into the demographics of daytime TV talk show producers. Are they in their 20s? Do they have children? Do they harbor grudges against their own mothers? There must be some common characteristic they share that spurs them on to continue to push the “mommy wars” agenda.
Of course, it’s our own fault because we pay attention to these shows and then we talk about them. A lot. Like I’m doing right here, natch.
This week, it was working moms versus stay-at-home moms on Anderson Cooper’s show. One guest had the audacity to call another mother on the show “lazy.” What? It really gets my goat when someone makes a snap decision about someone else like that, without any knowledge of what that other person is really like. Continue reading »
Should women be given a salary for their work at home?
Forget the “push present,” I’d much rather get a paycheck that shows me my work in the house and with the children is not just valued by my husband, but that he realizes and acknowledges that my time spent raising our children is just as important as his working time. And that it is inherently valuable and worth being compensated.
And I’m not the only one. In an interview with CNN, Wendy Luhabe, Chancellor of the University of Johannesburg and an international thought leader, says that women who give up careers to stay home and raise their children should be paid a salary.
Luhabe suggests that allocating a salary equal to 10% of the woman’s husband’s income would help assuage the resentment that some women feel at having to make the choice to stay home and would give more value to bringing up children in our society.
I can attest from personal experience that it really does. Continue reading »
I must say that after over ten years of parenting, I’ve got a pretty good record for keeping my cool in public with my kids.
Maybe I overcompensate because I have four children and feel like people are watching me extra-closely, just waiting for me to mess up.
Me, at home with my daughter, Violet
For the past decade I’ve worked as a producer in local television news. I’ve covered a lot of amazing stories during my career including the kidnapping and unbelievable return of Elizabeth Smart, the 2002 Winter Games in Salt Lake City, and some pretty high profile murder cases.
I loved it. I was never bored. And then I had a child and I hated it. The guilt over not spending more time with my daughter was crippling. She bonded more with her dad than with me and I felt left out. I determined that it would not be the same with my second child.
I gave birth to Henry a little over two months ago and was able to quit my job to become a freelance writer while on maternity leave. I am now a stay-at-home-mom who works from home. Guess what? The guilt is the same. I feel guilty I’m not entertaining the kids enough or that they may be watching too much TV.
The whole experience made me wonder: are working moms more prone to depression than those who stay at home?
I have an answer.
One guy says keeping up with this little fellow is no big deal.
Okay, people. Before you zip down to the comment section and rip me a new one for the title of this post, please note the quotation marks I used. You know why I used them? Because those aren’t my words. They’re the words of a “community columnist” from my local paper named David H. Howell.
Howell is presumably a smart man. At least that’s what I would gather given that he’s taught philosophy at Pellissippi State Community College since 1988. Howell is also presumably an in-touch man. At least that’s what I would gather given that he was a stay-at-home dad for two and a half years.
All that said, his “community column” read like a smugly written open letter to anyone who has ever complained about how difficult it is to be a full-time parent — its primary message as unmistakable as it is direct: “Oh, please. Get over yourselves, people.”
And such a message strikes me as neither smart nor in touch.
Life is going to knock us down, in ways we won't see coming.
Yesterday, I read Katy Read’s “Regrets of a Stay-at-Home Mom” piece on Salon.com, and haven’t been able to stop thinking about it since. She writes the article as a “warning to new mothers,” describing her own experience of how she opted-out of full-time work years ago to focus on her family, and now, after a divorce, is “permanently, financially screwed.”
I feel for her. She did what she thought was best for her family, and now she feels that she’s paying the price for it. Regret is a heavy burden. As I sat there reading her piece, I thought: “So, what’s the takeaway, here?” I mean, I may as well be Katy Read, in the years before she wrote this piece. When my oldest was born, I opted to forgo a full-time job with benefits in order to be at home more. I’ve been working in contract jobs ever since, taking on as much work as I can, while still trying to strike that balance between having time for the kids and all the things that need to happen for our family and our household to function. I have the sweetest, most supportive spouse. I believe that our marriage is strong, and I’d like to think that it will last ‘til death do us part. But, Katy thought that, too.
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